Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
Louis L'AmourRead
Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.
Interpretation
Books are essential for the development and continuity of civilization and culture.
This quote emphasizes the critical role that books play in shaping civilization and preserving history. It suggests that without access to literature, a society lacks the depth and continuity of its past narratives, reducing its collective memory to mere oral traditions and limits its understanding of who they are as a people.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of literature in shaping society.
Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.
Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
The biggest thing I noticed growing up when I was doing BMX racing or playing rugby through to secondary school level, was seeing the parents who were so desperate to see their kids do well that they were almost living their lives through their kids and putting huge pressure on them to the point they weren't enjoying it.
The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.
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